If you thought Of Pandas and People was an amusingly absurd high school textbook, wait until you see Quest for Right, a series of 7 textbooks that claims to disprove virtually everything in modern science. For some weird reason, they’ve made their website entirely of pictures rather than text, so here’s the front page:
Oh, but they are the same — crazy people are still saying crazy things and pretending that they’re backed up by science. You can view the table of contents and a sample chapter here. You’ll immediately notice that the author has no idea what the words “fact” and “theory” mean in science:
The theory of evolution, championed by Charles Darwin in the 19th Century, has stood the test of time to date. While evolution has not yet been proven to be a scientific fact, it is looked upon as a “verified” theory. The concept provides a logical interpretation of the environment so detailed and documented with plausible hypotheses that it compels acceptance. Caution, however, is implored, as many verified truths of yesterday later became an embarrassment to their proponents and were subsequently abandoned. All theories, until proven to be a scientific fact, are subject to revision, correction, and even rejection as scientists seek to understand and explain the environment. The purpose of the Quest for Right is to further that aim by taking an unbiased look at both scientific and religious concepts on origins. The investigation promises to be an authoritative and enlightening new look at the history of the “world that then was.”
Amusingly, the website actually markets the book to school boards by noting that they’re cheaper than the standard science textbooks. They should be.
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fifthdentist
June 13, 2012 at 11:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“For some weird reason, they’ve made their website entirely of pictures rather than text …”
They know their target audience can’t read?
dingojack
June 13, 2012 at 11:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Well of course they’re cheaper –
The textbook consists of a pair of covers with single page between. The page has a nice picture of the earth and moon with “Goddidit!” printed underneath in yellow Comic Sans.
How much would you expect to pay for this textbook?
Dingo
Reginald Selkirk
June 13, 2012 at 11:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
(roll-eyes) – there is no competition between those two groups of people, since the theory of evolution is good science.
puppygod
June 13, 2012 at 11:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There is only one plausible explanation – they hate blind people. What other reason than contempt for people using text-to-speech software could there be?
eric
June 13, 2012 at 11:30 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would, too, if I mixed tenses and abused passive voice the way that sample paragraph does. If this is a representative sample, no wonder kids hate textbooks – even Twilight contains better writing.
Modusoperandi
June 13, 2012 at 11:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
puppygod, they can use picture-to-speech software. In this case it translates that page as “Bullcrap!” repeated 1,000 times.
gshelley
June 13, 2012 at 11:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Is it real or parody? It’s hard to get through the jargon, but they seem to be saying that fruit browning is not oxidation, but pigment concentration due to oxidation and that burning wood does not produce water vapor, any water vapor observed was previously stored in the wood.
Neither of which are exactly mainstream views
Dr X
June 13, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So does this standard apply to the inerrancy of the bible, sola scriptura, the divinity of Jesus…?
Do they teach their own children to always doubt if not scientifically “proven?”
Jesus is just a theory.
tassilo
June 13, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I always end up marveling at the ability of those people to market their stuff. They understand their market audience perfectly, and they know exactly what to sell to them and how to sell it. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better demonstration of singing to the choir and getting paid for it.
Artor
June 13, 2012 at 11:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“All theories, until proven to be a scientific fact, are subject to revision, correction, and even rejection as scientists seek to understand and explain the environment.”
This is true as far as it goes, except that even after something is accepted as fact, it can still be revised if new evidence is found to challenge it. Why is it so hard for wingnuts to understand that changing your mind when you find out something new is a good thing? I’d think that remaining wrong after your position is proven to be wrong is just…wrong. But then I’m not a fundie Xtian wingnut.
matty1
June 13, 2012 at 11:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Reason is only relevant if they are sane, they may be doing because the voices told them to.
stephenmurphy
June 13, 2012 at 11:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Quotey goodness from their T of C:
“The venture into the submicroscopic world of the atom is accounted under the auspices of the old physics of cause and effect. The valid redox affirmations of the 18th century, which were tied to classical physics, have been debased by the eroding influence of electrochemical analysis, the basis of which is quantum magic and mathematical evaluations. The accurate assertions were set aside as incomplete in order to provide room for the impractical and fantastic beliefs of visionaries (dreamers). The arbitrary assessments of oxidation-reduction reactions are swept away by fundamental deductions based on cause and effect. A few of the subjects *entertained* are: electricity, electrolyte, the browning of fruit, the mystery of fire, and the role of oxygen in the ignition of hydrocarbons.”
“Entertained” is the right word there….
That’s some serious woo indeed; thanks for the entertaining link Ed.
bobaho
June 13, 2012 at 12:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
For some weird reason, they’ve made their website entirely of pictures rather than text, so here’s the front page
If the image is representative of their work the answer is simple. Layering images and text is rather difficult from an HTML/CSS point of view. You are hard pressed to control or account for different browsers, screen resolutions, or other individual preferences (AdBlock images, etc.). By making the page an image you force the browser to load it in a manner that you control. I suspect they like that control and likely have limited graphic design skills.
As for the blithering idiocy it contains, well the graphic designer little control in that regard.
democommie
June 13, 2012 at 12:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Does the seventh page of the seventh chapter of the seventh book have a pitcher of JESUS with a line of script underneath that says:
“You’ve been pwned, you fucking rubes!” ?
Cuz, I mean, after the first six books anyone continuing has prolly lost the will/ability to read.
d cwilson
June 13, 2012 at 12:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I love how the mere fact that they’ve published their books is considered a “day of victory”.
I’ve said this before: Creationists think science is all about tellking a convincing story. Concepts like comparing your ideas to actual data are completely beyond their comprehension. They believe they can gish gallup their way through any debate and then declare victory simply by looking at the evidence presented and saying, “Nuh-uh.”
Alchemists believed that wood was a mixture of the four “elements” fire, rock, air, and water and that burning it released them from each other. Maybe they’re not content to take science back to the 18th century and want to go all the way to the 12th.
thisisaturingtest
June 13, 2012 at 12:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@#7, gshelley
“Jargon” is exactly the first word that came to my mind when I tried to read some of this crap- it’s all but unreadable for the jargon. But some of it is pretty revealing. From their synopsis for Chapter 5:
Their “weightier principle” seems to amount to “we’ll make up our own damn standards!” So much for “unbiased.”
thisisaturingtest
June 13, 2012 at 12:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@#15, d cwilson:
That’s pretty much in line with the sense I’ve always gotten that they’ve redefined “science” (and for the same reason they redefine “theory”) to allow their ideas an equality the ideas themselves don’t merit, by their own weight. To them, science is just a body of knowledge- what’s in books- with, as you say, absolutely no concern with the methods that produced that knowledge. Doing this, of course, means they can say their bible is just as valid as any science text, since they’re all just books- who cares what’s in them? Just another angle of their “competing worldviews” meme.
eric
June 13, 2012 at 12:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Stephen @12 – thanks for that quote. They have major issues with electrochemistry and redox reactions? It sounds to me like the authors didn’t pass high school chemistry, and so have decided anything they didn’t understand must be wrong.
Marcus Ranum
June 13, 2012 at 12:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The like science so much that they forgot for a moment that “god” is just a theory. One for which there’s surprisingly little evidence.
It’s weird that someone can respect the scientific method so much that they ignore it completely.
Brain Hertz
June 13, 2012 at 1:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh dear god… the piles of wrong and stupid that fall out of this text are just jaw-dropping. Are people actually going to use this nonsense to teach “science” to kids?
Thirty seconds of googling will tell you that Avogadro didn’t know what the actual number was. It was determined later by other people, including a century later by Jean Perrin, for which he received a Nobel Prize. Seriously, does this guy do any fact-checking at all? And did he really use the term “astronillion” in a purported science textbook?
[facepalm] Look. It. Up.
A mole is defined that way in the SI system, as a fundamental constant, and the other units of measurement are defined in terms of the fundamental physical constant. We know precisely how many entities there are in a mole by definition.
Peter B
June 13, 2012 at 1:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
gshelley @7 quotes “Quest for Right”
>burning wood does not produce water vapor, any water vapor observed was previously stored in the wood.
I would like to see how “Quest for Right” accounts for hydrogen atoms in the various components of wood. Does burning hydrocarbons and carbohydrates make only good carbon dioxide and no water?
I propose an experiment: Start by grinding an already dry tumbleweed to dust. Bake at 150°C for an hour to drive out all but a tiny fraction of the previously stored water. Burn to ash in a sealed chamber collecting all resulting water. Compare weight of water collected to dry weight of the tumbleweed dust. Explain your results. (The water should be a little over half of the dry tumbleweed weight.)
Or they could explain that most of the hydrogen incorporated into plant material originally came from water. “Quest for Right” should learn a little chemistry before writing about it….
holytape
June 13, 2012 at 1:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“the marvelous apparatus of sight (the eye), quantum creation (Big Bang Theory), Darwinism, and the accretion of the electric planets”
WFT is an electric planet?
Strewth
June 13, 2012 at 1:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Holytape – It’s like Electric Avenue. Only, y’know, bigger.
Stevarious
June 13, 2012 at 2:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I tried to fix it, but it didn’t help. They still sound like idiots.
tubi
June 13, 2012 at 2:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If you haven’t yet, you really should view the presentation for school board members. It is a mass of nonsense and I can’t imagine any board member presenting who wouldn’t get laughed out of the room, but you never know. I’d love to know my local board was presenting it and show up and just ask questions all night long, but most of it makes so little sense, I wouldn’t know where to start.
bruceh
June 13, 2012 at 2:08 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I looked at the HTML source. If the amateurish design and poor grammar wasn’t enough to destroy any credibility these fine folks may have possessed (once, long ago, maybe), I found this:
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">I swear, a demented squirrel could create a more professional site using nothing but crayon, construction paper, and a fax machine.
Brain Hertz
June 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just off the top of my head, I think the procedure involves determining whether or not a block of wood weighs more than a duck.
D. C. Sessions
June 13, 2012 at 2:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I agree that this is just painful. For instance, Avogadro’s Number: back in the dim and distant past, my high school science class (physics, not chemistry, but so?) didn’t take it as a given, we freaking measured it experimentally. Not that hard to do, after all.
tubi
June 13, 2012 at 2:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@26, bruceh,
Speaking of poor HTML grammar, the title of the page quest3.htm is
tubi
June 13, 2012 at 2:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Can anyone figure out what class would be the target audience? If a school board proposed buying these, where would they be used?
By the time kids are in HS, they are learning science in specific classes, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. This series is more of a history of science [sic] than a textbook for use in any particular class. I could see teaching kids at 7th or 8th grade some general concepts about how everything ties together before they go off and delve deeper into each of the disciplines in turn, but the writing is so convoluted and absurd that they wouldn’t possibly understand it.
I can barely understand it, and I have a Masters. In History, to be fair, but still…
Also, the entire series is bullshit.
Sastra
June 13, 2012 at 2:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Once, in the LTE section of my local paper, someone explained that St. Paul verified the truth of Christianity “scientifically.” He saw a vision on the road to Damascus with his own eyes.
Apparently, that’s what science starts with: someone has an experience. This experience is then repeated to others and either accepted or denied by groups and individuals: it all depends on whether the person who originally had the experience is considered trustworthy. That’s how science works — when you filter it through a religious mindset.
If this is how you understand the scientific process, then that nonsense in the book about Avogadro and everyone just accepting what he said without question for years and years now makes sense after all. But calling it a “science text” really, really doesn’t. On multiple levels.
Sastra
June 13, 2012 at 2:54 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
By the way, if you start to do a search on “Tate Publishing” yahoo helpfully offers to finish it as “Tate publishing scam.” It’s a vanity press — and apparently not a very credible one at that.
Of Pandas and People was serious pseudoscientific bullshit, a textbook put together by a well-funded and determined committee with experience in the creationism/evolution academic debate. My guess is that this is probably some guy working out of the rec room in his basement.
eric
June 13, 2012 at 3:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I second tubi’s @25 – you really should read that powerpoint. I’m loving slide 18. His theory has eliminated the scientific mishap of “spatial problems.” Excellent. Movers everywhere will be relieved to know that grand pianos now fit through single width doorways.
Can anyone figure out what class would be the target audience? If a school board proposed buying these, where would they be used?
Art class for paper mache?
There are no problems or activities for students to do in any of the example material. So either they’re meant for a very young grade, or the author is as knowledgable in education as he is in science.
Brain Hertz
June 13, 2012 at 3:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@25 – that presentation is pretty funny (or maybe it should be scary?).
I particularly liked the list of elements of physics that the author claims to have “disproved”. On the list is the Pauli exclusion principle. Maybe somebody should explain to him that the Pauli exclusion principle is rather fundamental to semiconductor physics, and he’s claiming to have proved that the computer he’s using to post his bullshit to the Internet doesn’t work.
D. C. Sessions
June 13, 2012 at 3:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Among other things. Like, why don’t all of the electrons in an atom collapse to the same state?
eric
June 13, 2012 at 3:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sastra: If this is how you understand the scientific process, then that nonsense in the book about Avogadro and everyone just accepting what he said without question for years and years now makes sense after all.
No, it still makes no sense because he is fundamentally misunderstanding what avogadro’s number is. Having some common measure of quantity is important and useful, but that particular unit is historical and arbitrary. We might just as easily have used silicon as our basis. Or gone the SI route and tried to normalize the unit to some rational amount, like saying 1 mol = 1E20 particles. We could still do that, the same way we are historically in the porcess of standardizing Curies to Bequerels, calories to joules, pounds and stones and such to kilograms, et cetera. Its just a convenient, human-scale measure of a large number of atoms, the same way kilograms is (often) a more convenient, human-scale measure than grams. But the actual number of atoms we decide makes up 1 mol is pretty arbitrary.
Brain Hertz
June 13, 2012 at 3:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, but you get around that by assuming that an electron is a sort of rigid spinning ring. This seems to be quite popular in creationist circles:
(standard IQ damage warnings apply)
http://commonsensescience.org/
curtcameron
June 13, 2012 at 4:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
From the author photo page (where you can get a 1731×2136 pixel photo of the author and what I presume is his wife), is this bit of modesty:
tubi
June 13, 2012 at 4:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@38, curtcameron,
From the author bio:
So what the F are the doing making presentations for school boards? Shouldn’t they have a presentation for college administrators?
I know, I know. They’re idiots. This is just bugging me.
leonardschneider
June 13, 2012 at 4:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Does it also come with a Spike Jones CD? Because the only sounds I hear when reading creationist “scientific” hypothesis is the bridge from Cocktails for Two. (Forward to 1:37 if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
briandavis
June 13, 2012 at 5:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So “spooky action at a distance” is really talking about mind control?
How can anyone deny the author’s claims that he has eliminated religion from creation science leaving real testable science that will stand up to court challenges?
Uncle Glenny
June 13, 2012 at 7:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I thought marriage was between one man and one woman.
Federalism.
alwayscurious
June 13, 2012 at 7:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wow, just wow. The scientific council teamed up with liberal educators to form a federation of mystics (Chapter 10′s introduction)?? I think I need to read a real textbook to regain some of the IQ points I just lost! The only reasonable explanation is that this is a dihydrous monoxide joke writ large. So many brain cells have died to produce that work of fiction.
rabbitscribe
June 13, 2012 at 7:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The singularity is described as “infinitely smaller than the dot on an “i.” It would then also be infinitely smaller than the dot on this “i,” a 30-foot-tall “i” on a billboard, a quark, and Jupiter.
bryanfeir
June 13, 2012 at 8:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
holytape@22:
I suspect ‘Electric planet’ means that they’re including Plasma cosmology and the corresponding anti-Big Bang theories in amongst their ‘radical’ ideas.
If you have a strong stomach for pseudo-science, look up ‘Electric Universe’. The guy who wrote that was a Velikovskyite.
denisepatterson-monroe
June 13, 2012 at 8:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wow. So this series is so amazingly bad that apparently even whoever designed the cover only wanted to give it one out of seven stars?
(Oh, I know, I know, but it’s funnier this way.)
That is ASTONISHINGLY bad. I think I’ll read the sample chapter to my middle school DD to make her laugh. Maybe I’ll print it off so she can take it with her to Camp Quest Ohio next week and let all the kids have fun with it.
helenaconstantine
June 13, 2012 at 10:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh, Eric! the only passive in that paragraph is ‘caution … is implored.” The problem isn’t the passive. No doubt the text was originally written with the more idiomatic, “Caution is urged” which you wouldn’t have noticed, but some clumsy editor thought he was improving it by substituting what he conceived of as a more precise word than the usual idiom.
You poor thing! You must be a victim of Stunk and White.
helenaconstantine
June 13, 2012 at 10:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Its hard to believe that sentences like the following were written by native English speakers:
The cleric scholarship, unaccustomed to the laws of classical physics, has been rendered impotent in the submission of any viable mechanism.
Refutes the irreconcilable ideas of the polite adversary and maintains the integrity of scripture.
The true physical and chemical properties of the elements and compounds have been partially obscured by the underlying factor of philosophy; in this instance, that of the scientific council. The belief of the council is weighed alongside the scientific evidence and separated piecemeal so as to present the evidence in an unadulterated form. …The court’s definition of science, “that which scientists are generally associated with and perform,” is reevaluated so as to determine if said definition is arguably correspondent or else gravely overstated.
Doug Little
June 13, 2012 at 11:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dingo @2,
puppygod @4
Does text to speech software inform the listener that it is written in comic sans… and would they care? I guess one could be told about the correlation between comic sans and stupidity even if they had never set eyes on it so to speak. For that matter can the software inform the person about random capitalization and caps lock malfunction.
Aliasalpha
June 14, 2012 at 12:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Am, I the only one reading that intro page in the voice of “dramatic movie trailer guy”?
tacitus
June 14, 2012 at 1:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I notice the odd phrase
is showing up in their blurb.
This is a dead giveaway that not only are they young-earth creationists, but–like Andy Schlafly (of Conservapedia fame)–they also deny Einstein’s work, condemning the Theory of Relativity as a fraud intended to foist relativism on the world (I kid you not!).
dingojack
June 14, 2012 at 2:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Doug Little – clearly when the text-to-speech got to the Comic Sans it’d switch to sounding like Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel.
Yes I think the introduction would be text-to-speeched into ‘over-excited movie intro guy’ (with something suspiciously like ‘Star Wars’ as bakground music), or perhaps it should be; ‘as read by William Shatner’!
Dingo
Moggie
June 14, 2012 at 2:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The language! Reading many of the passages quoted so far, I thought “this is how dumb people think smart people write”. But even dumb people will spot the peevish tone throughout: won’t that put them off? It’s tiring!
Also, they wear cool capes.
dingojack
June 14, 2012 at 3:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
‘The Obstructionist League’ – sounds like a bunch of DC supervillians, or an 80′s New Wave band.
Dingo
democommie
June 14, 2012 at 7:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“The Obstructionist League’ – sounds like a bunch of DC supervillians, or an 80′s New Wave band.”
I thought it was a social organization for MD’s.
thisisaturingtest
June 14, 2012 at 8:12 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Tacitus @#51- they use that phrase a lot, along with an appeal to return to the “classical physics” of the 18th century. Apparently, things after then got too complicated and actually scientific to reconcile with their bible.
dingojack
June 14, 2012 at 9:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Demo – gastroenterologists or ob-gyn?
:) Dingo
——–
or perhaps occulsions of the blood vessels?
puppygod
June 14, 2012 at 9:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Doug Little @49
Hmm, none that I know have such functionality set as default. But I like dingojack idea. It shouldn’t be hard to make script that would switch into different voice whenever certain typeface is detected. Making it sound insane when random caps are detected is probably a little more complicated, but not impossible.
Childermass
June 14, 2012 at 10:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The “Common Sense Science” created by Thomas Barnes is outright sane compared to C. David Parsons.
“The Quest for Right” attacks the Periodic Table of the Elements as anti-God. Repeat for effect: He thinks the Periodic Table is anti-God. I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating. It is not satire. This beyond the wildest dream of the guy who dreamed up Poe’s Law.
And don’t call them Mercury, Venus, etc. Call them Tether, Braker, etc. since it is anti-God to name things after other gods. The Apollo program is renamed the Concord program and laws need to be made preventing any future programs being named after false gods.
Only two elementary particles really exist: The proton and the electron. Everything else is false such as quarks, mesons, photons, neutrons, neutrinos, etc.
I give the kook one small bit of credit, he at least realized the science and its results disprove a fundy YEC worldview and thus the only way to preserve a fundy YEC is to utterly reject science.
Absorption specta exist only within a spectrometer and does not exist in the light measured.
And if what I say make you think this guy is a loon, I barely scratched the surface of just how loony he his and just how much of the most basic and centuries established science that this guy utterly rejects.
I hope that Ed files away this piece of information: Jay Sekulow, the chief council of the American Center for Law and Justice wrote a gushing forward for Volume 2. This guy might be part of future attempts to get some form of creationism in the schools. This could be used against him.
Finally there is an article in the June 13 Oklahoma Gazette called “On For the Books” about the publisher. He was recorded doing a horridly evil and unethical thing.
Childermass
June 14, 2012 at 10:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Brain Hertz @ 20:
Actually that is not true. A mole is defined as how many atoms there are in 12 grams of carbon-12. Until such time as a mole gets redefined, scientists still have to measure how big a mole is. Of course, that number being around 6.02×10^23 is well established science well supported by experimental science contrary to the nut in question.
Modusoperandi
June 14, 2012 at 11:42 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Test.
thisisaturingtest
June 14, 2012 at 12:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wow- that’s not even scientific curiosity anymore, much less science. That’s just throwing up your hands and giving up- “hell, I dunno, let’s just say goddidit and be done with it.”
Peter B
June 14, 2012 at 12:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re @60 Childermass
Indeed, Avogadro’s number changed in 1961. And not because it was measured more accurately. It was a matter of definition. Before the change one had to know how the atomic mass unit was defined.
Pre 1961
Chemist’s scale: atmospheric oxygen = 16 exactly.
Physicist’s scale O16 = 16 exactly.
Post 1961
All: C12 = 12 exactly.
I took a break from college that year and when I returned the molecular weight of every molecule had changed. But not by much. Also that was the year CPS became Hz.
See paragraph 4 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/41803/atomic-weight
wheatdogg
June 14, 2012 at 12:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I haven’t visited the website yet, but the PowerPoint pres violates one of the cardinal rules of effective PPT slides — don’t write a damned book on the slides! I can just imagine this nut rambling on at high speed, whilst flipping through those verbose slides every 30 seconds.
Also, those photos look like stock photos. I wonder if he bothered to pay for the rights to use them.
wheatdogg
June 14, 2012 at 12:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just read the sample chapter. He actually expects teenagers to wade through all that verbosity?
These books fail on multiple levels. Move along, people. Nothing worth seeing here. No school board in the world would touch these things.
…..
I hope.
Childermass
June 14, 2012 at 1:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re: Peter B @ 62:
Indeed the mole is likely to be redefined in a few years. Instead of 12 grams of carbon-12 having a mole of atoms, it would define a mole much like Brain Hertz @ 20 thinks it is now i.e. defining Avogadro’s number as some number and thus it would be defined and not measured unlike today where the value must be measured using the carbon-12 standard. The kilogram is also likely to be refined to finally get away from using some piece of metal in Paris as the definition of a kilogram.
Stevarious
June 14, 2012 at 2:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Really?
*googles*
Wow. So if I, say, stole that piece of metal and shot it off to the moon in a rocket, would the kilogram change its value?
Childermass
June 14, 2012 at 3:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
No. Going to the Moon changes the weight and not the mass (ignoring some insignificant effects of relativity). Of course if you damage the piece of metal, then we might have a problem. And indeed it is hard to completely prevent changes to that piece of metal from happening which is one reason stop using a physical artifact as the standard. (And of course since the definition of mole uses 0.012 kilograms of carbon-12 the problem compounds.) However until recently, it was still more practical to use a physical artifact as the standard. Other SI units also used to us physical artifacts in the past.
A quick check shows that Wikipedia’s article on the kilogram shows a photo of that piece of metal.
Stevarious
June 14, 2012 at 3:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So, if I chop a piece off… hmm…
Ooh, even better question.
If I somehow cut it exactly in half, which piece would be the remaining kilogram?